Partners in Wonder

by Harlan Ellison

  The two fighters for economic justice disengaged, and with hoarse bellows summoned their followers. In moments, the saws were stuttering through tendon and gristle, while cleavers flashed, separating radii from ulnae. Caught up in the mood of the moment, the riot cops, who had been delayed in their arrival at that end of the beast by a call for help from the beat cop, and who had paused to lend a hand in getting the cuffs on Kiley, formed a bucketless bucket brigade, passing along the assorted chunks of anatomy as they were freed from the carcass. Thirty seconds before the deadline, the last slab of reptile disappeared into the chippers. The firemen hosed down the pavement. The crowd disappeared into the places crowds disappear into. In the bars, beer flowed. Sirens wailed as firemen and peace officers returned to interrupted pinochle games. A single scrap of pteranodon hide, overlooked by the flensers, floated along the gutter and disappeared down the storm drain, where, due to a curious concatenation of circumstances, it eventually lodged in an orifice serving a large department store, resulting in the simultaneous overflow of the third floor pay toilets.

  Two newsmen, having been torn away from a fruitless assignment emanating from the City Desk whereat an anonymous phone call had narked that Senator Seymour F. Lark (R., Vermont) (he who had been accused by Senate Subcommittee of squirreling away a quarter of a million skins in monies allegedly originally contributed to his campaign re-election exchequer) was lying doggo in the apartment of a lady of shady reputation, just off Sixth Avenue at 46th Street, came upon the recent scene of so much reptilian-oriented turmoil, and encountered little more than moist patches of concrete and a few spots where the acid in the blood of the now-vanished pteranodon had managed to eradicate the lane stripes of Sixth Avenue.

  “Another dry run,” Ollie, the taller scrivener stated glumly.

  “Uh-huh, Stanley,” the fat one said.

  “Hey, Madame,” the tall one accosted a matron in a man’s sweater and run over shoes. “You see anything of a giant reptile around here?”

  “I don’t know nothing,” the interrogee replied, and continued her bee-line for the copy of the National Enquirer she had spotted in the litter basket. The other pedestrians who had begun to clot at the prospect of a lively interchange, drifted unobtrusively away, scenting official interest in their affairs. The newsmen shrugged and disappeared into a bar. Traffic resumed its normal flow. The sun shone on a peaceful street. The Governor’s car paused at the intersection. His Governorship scanned the prospect, saw nothing amiss, and relaxed against the forty-dollar-a-yard upholstery.

  “Peace,” he said. “It’s wonderful.”

  At that moment a black speck appeared in the patch of sky visible between the serried cornices above. It grew, became a ragged bird-shape, tumbling end-over-end, whistling…

  With a resounding splat, a second pteranodon impacted in the street.

  FINIS

  INTRODUCTION

  Roger Zelazny and Harlan Ellison

  COME TO ME NOT IN WINTER’S WHITE

  Working with Roger Zelazny on this story was one of the easiest, most pleasurable work-experiences I’ve had in many years. It was a cross-country collaboration, with Roger starting the story, writing through to the paragraph whose last line is Still he worked to slow her room even more, and then mailing the pages to me. He did not indicate where or how he thought the story should go, as he had assumed the role of picking the game, and it was my job to set the rules.

  In collaborations of this sort, I’ve found, the opening sets the tone and the major characters and indicates the area in which the work will be done. That is roughly 1000 words. In the second thousand the direction of the plot and the initial complications should emerge; in the third thousand the complications should intensify, the characterization should solidify and the solutions should be indicated, however minutely. The final thousand words or so of a short story of this kind are the summing-up and solving areas. It worked just that way with “Winter’s White.”

  In my thousand words, from “Mister Manos, your bill is now two hundred thousand dollars a week” to And he left them together, I set up the basic situation that Roger would intensify in the following section.

  He wrote from “Do you know Neruda?” to he knew pain once more. I finished the story.

  There was virtually no rewrite. I went over it once, after it was finished, to smooth some awkwardnesses we’d encountered in the mails, and then it went off to be published.

  I am very proud of this story. Silverberg contends it’s mawkish, and a fan writer said it was the worst of both Zelazny and Ellison, and as far as I’m concerned they can both go jump, where this story is concerned. Because, in a career lifetime of writing violent and frequently loveless fictions, this is one of the few times I feel my work has reached toward gentleness and compassion, and I don’t think I would have been able to do anything even remotely like it, had it not been for Roger. It also introduced me to the writings of Pablo Neruda, and if I’d been enriched no further, it would all have been worth it.

  For that is the chief benefit of collaboration, for a writer. He learns. As I have learned from each of these men. And now that the book is finished, I can say with a humility quite foreign to me…

  Thank you, gentlemen.

  Come to Me Not in Winter’s White

  She was dying and he was the richest man in the world, but he couldn’t buy her life. So he did the next best thing. He built the house, different from any other house that had ever been. She was transported to it by ambulance, and their goods and furnishings followed in many vans.

  They had been married little over a year; then she had been stricken. The specialists shook their heads and named a new disease after her. They gave her six-months-to-a year; then they departed, leaving behind them prescriptions and the smell of antiseptics. But he was not defeated. Nothing as commonplace as death could defeat him.

  For he was the greatest physicist ever employed by AT&T in the year of Our Lord and President Farrar, nineteen hundred and ninety-eight.

  (When one is incalculably wealthy from birth, one feels a sense of one’s own personal unworthiness; so having been denied the joys of grueling labor and abject poverty, he had labored over himself. He had made of himself one who was incalculably worthy—the greatest physicist the world had ever known. It was enough for him…until he had met her. Then he wanted much more.)

  He didn’t have to work for AT&T, but he enjoyed it. They allowed him the use of their immense research facilities to explore his favorite area—Time, and the waning thereof.

  He knew more about the nature of Time than any other human being who had ever lived.

  It might be said that Carl Manos was Chronos/Ops/Saturn/Father Time himself, for he fitted even the description with his long dark beard and his slashing, scythe-like walking-stick. He knew Time as no other man had ever known it, and he had the power and the will and the love to exploit it.

  How?

  Well, there was the house. He’d designed it himself. Had it built in less than six weeks, settling a strike by himself to insure its completion on time.

  What was so special about the house?

  It had a room; a room like no other room that had ever existed, anywhere.

  In this room, Time ignored the laws of Albert Einstein and obeyed those of Carl Manos.

  What were those laws and what was this room?

  To reverse the order of the questions, the room was the bedroom of his beloved Laura, who had Lora Manosism, an affliction of the central nervous system, named after her. The disease was monstrously degenerative; four months after diagnosis, she would be a basket case. Five months—blind, incapable of speech. Six-months-to-a year—dead. She dwelled in the bedroom that Time feared to enter. She lived there while he worked and fought for her. This was because, for every year that passed outside the room, only a week went by within. Carl had so ordained it, and it cost him eighty-five thousand dollars a week to maintain the equipment that made it so. He would see her live and be cured,
no matter what the cost, though his beard changed its appearance with each week that passed for her. He hired specialists, endowed a foundation to work on her cure; and every day, he grew a trifle older. Although she had been ten years his junior, the gap was rapidly widened. Still he worked to slow her room even more.

  “Mister Manos, your bill is now two hundred thousand dollars a week.”

  “I’ll pay it,” he told the power & light people, and did. It was now down to three days for every year.

  And he would enter her room and speak with her.

  “Today is July ninth,” he said. “When I leave in the morning it will be around Christmastime. How do you feel?”

  “Short of breath,” she replied. “What do the doctors tell you?”

  “Nothing, yet,” he said. “They’re working on your problem, but there’s no answer in sight.”

  “I didn’t think so. I don’t think there ever will be.”

  “Don’t be fatalistic, love. If there’s a problem, there’s an answer—and there’s plenty of time. All the time in the world…”

  “Did you bring me a newspaper?”

  “Yes. This will keep you caught up. There’s been a quick war in Africa, and a new presidential candidate has come onto the scene.”

  “Please love me.”

  “I do.”

  “No, I know that. Make love to me.”

  They smiled at her fear of certain words, and then he undressed and made love to her.

  Then, after, there came a moment of truth, and he said, “Laura, I have to tell you the way it is. We’re nowhere yet, but I have the best neurological minds in the world working on your problem. There’s been one other case like yours since I locked you away—that is, since you came to stay here—and he’s dead already. But they have learned something from him and they will continue to learn. I’ve brought you a new medicine.”

  “Will we spend Christmas together?” she asked.

  “If you wish.”

  “So be it.”

  And so it was.

  He came to her at Christmastime, and together they decorated the tree and opened presents.

  “Hell of a Christmas with no snow,” she said.

  “Such language—and from a lady!”

  But he brought her snow and a Yule log and his love.

  “I’m awful,” she said. “I can’t stand myself sometimes. You’re doing everything you can and nothing happens, so I harass you. I’m sorry.”

  She was five feet seven inches in height and had black hair. Black? So black as to be almost blue, and her lips were a pink and very special pair of cold shell-coral things. Her eyes were a kind of dusk where there are no clouds and the day sets off the blue with its going. Her hands shook whenever she gestured, which was seldom.

  “Laura,” he told her, “even as we sit here, they work. The answer, the cure, will come to pass—in time.”

  “I know.”

  “You wonder, though, whether it will be time enough. It will. You’re virtually standing still while everything outside races by. Don’t worry. Rest easy. I’ll bring you back.”

  “I know that,” she said. “It’s just that I sometimes—despair.”

  “Don’t.”

  “I can’t help it.”

  “I know more about Time than anybody else…You’ve got it: on your side.”

  He swung his stick like a saber, beheading roses that grew about the wall. “We can take a century,” he said, quickly, as though loath to lose even a moment, “without your being harmed. We can wait on the answer that has to come. Sooner or later, there will be an answer. If I go away for a few months, it will be as a day to you. Don’t worry. I’ll see you cured and we’ll be together again in a brighter day—for God sake don’t worry! You know what they told you about psychosomatic conversions!”

  “Yes, I shouldn’t have one.”

  “Then don’t. There are even other tricks I will be able to play with Time, as it goes on—such as freezing. You’ll come out okay, believe me.”

  “Yes,” she said, raising her glass of Irish Mist. “Merry Christmas.”

  “Merry Christmas!”

  But even for a man who has been thought incalculably wealthy, lack of attention to compounding that wealth, monomaniacal ferocity in pursuing a goal, and a constant, heavy drain, inevitably the end comes in sight. Though the view to that end was a long look, though there were more years that could be put to use, even so it became obvious to everyone around him that Carl Manos had committed himself to a crusade that would end in his destruction. At least financially. And for them, that was the worst sort of destruction. For they had not lived in the thoughts of Manos, were unaware that there were other, far more exacting destructions.

  He came to her in the early summer, and he brought a recording of zarzuela love duets by de la Cruz, Hidalgo Bréton. They sat beside each other, their hands touching, and they listened to the voices of others who were in love, all through July and August. He only sensed her restlessness as August drew to a close and the recording shusssed into silence.

  “What?” he asked, softly.

  “It’s nothing. Nothing, really.”

  “Tell me.”

  She spoke, then, of loneliness.

  And condemned herself with more words; for her ingratitude, her thoughtlessness, her lack of patience. He kissed her gently, and told her he would do something about it.

  When he left the room, the first chill of September was in that corner of the world. But he set about finding a way to stave off her loneliness. He thought first of himself living in the room, of conducting his experiments in the room without Time. But that was unfeasible, for many reasons—most of them dealing with Time. And he needed a great deal of space to conduct the experiments: building additions to the room was impossible. He could see, himself, that there would not be sufficient funds to expand the experiment.

  So he did the next best thing.

  He had his Foundation scour the world for a suitable companion. After three months they submitted a list of potentials to him. There were two. Only two.

  The first was a handsome young man named Thomas Grindell, a bright and witty man who spoke seven languages fluently, had written a perceptive history of mankind, had traveled widely, was outspoken and in every other possible way was the perfect companion.

  The second was an unattractive woman named Yolande Loeb. She was equally as qualified as Grindell, had been married and divorced, wrote excellent poetry, and had dedicated her life to various social reforms.

  Even Carl Manos was not so deeply immersed in his problem that he could not see the ramifications of possible choice. He discarded the name of Grindell.

  To Yolande Loeb he offered the twin lures of extended life and financial compensation sufficient to carry her without worry through three lifetimes. The woman accepted.

  Carl Manos took her to the room, and before the door was keyed-open from the control console, he said, “I want her to be happy. To be kept occupied. No matter what she wants, she’s to have it. That is all I ask of you.”

  “I’ll do my best, Mr. Manos.”

  “She’s a wonderful person, I’m sure you’ll love her.”

  “I’m sure.”

  He opened the outer chamber, and they entered. When they had neutralized temporarily, the inner chamber was opened, and he entered with the woman.

  “Hello.”

  Laura’s eyes widened when she saw her, but when Carl had told her Miss Loeb had come to keep her company, to be the friend Laura had needed, she smiled and kissed his hand.

  “Laura and I will have so much time to get acquainted,” Yolande Loeb said, “why don’t you spend this time together?” And she took herself to the far corner of the room, to the bookshelf, and pulled down a Dickens to reread.

  Laura drew Carl Manos down to her and kissed him. “You are so very good to me.”

  “Because I love you. It’s that simple. I wish everything was that simple.”

  “How
is it coming?”

  “Slowly. But coming.”

  She was concerned about him. “You look so tired. Carl.”

  “Weary, not tired. There’s a big difference.”

  “You’ve grown older.”

  “I think the gray in my beard is very distinguished.”

  She laughed lightly at that, but he was glad he had brought Miss Loeb, and not Grindell. Thrown together in a room where Time nearly stood still, for endless months that would not be months to them, who knew what could happen? Laura was an extraordinarily beautiful woman. Any man would find himself falling in love with her. But with Miss Loeb as companion—well, it was safe now.

  “I have to get back. We’re trying some new catalysts today. Or rather, however many days ago it was when I came in here. Take care, darling. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  Laura nodded understanding. “Now that I have a friend, it won’t be so lonely till you return, dearest.”

  “Would you like me to bring anything special next time?”

  “The sandalwood incense?”

  “Of course.”

  “Now I won’t be lonely,” she repeated.

  “No. I hope not. Thank you.”

  And he left them together.

  “Do you know Neruda?” Miss Loeb asked.

  “Pardon me?”

  “The Chilean poet? The Heights of Macchu Picchu? One of his greatest works?”

  “No, I’m afraid that I don’t.”

  “I have it with me. It is a piece of blazing power. There is a certain strength within it, which I thought you—”

  “…Might take heart from while contemplating death. No. Thank you, but no. It was bad enough, just thinking about all the things the few people I have read have said about life’s ending. I am a coward, and I know that one day I will die, as everyone must. Only, in my condition, I have a schedule. This happens, then this happens, and then it is all over. The only thing between me and death is my husband.”

  “Mr. Manos is a fine man. He loves you very much.”

  “Thank you. Yes, I know. So if you wish to console me concerning this, then I am not especially interested.”